It’s hip2b2

I just finished listening to a number of backlogged Harvard Business Review Ideacasts. My interests was intrigued by one of them. It was HBR IdeaCast 21 on Extreme Jobs. This features an interview with Sylvia Ann Hewlett who is a co-author of the highly provocative “Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek” featured in the December issue of Harvard Business Review. Very interesting stuff indeed. It harks the 40-hour work week is a thing of the past! What are the characteristics of an extreme job. Let me do an analysis of my job.

1. Working in excess of 70 hours a week. Interestingly, I typically spend 10 hours in the office for 5 days in a week that roughly translates to about 50 hours. I also have 1 hour before and after work doing follow-ups, emails and telecons every weekday of the week. This translates to an additional 10 hours. Plus about 4 hours of work during the weekend. Therefore, my total is 64 hours of work per week. This is primarily due to the global operations of the company. Not the usual 40 hour workday but not too extreme yet. Of course, during business trips this ratio changes. Work hours tend to be longer.
2. On call for the entire day. This is also interestingly true. But not most of the time … at least, not yet. Firefighting is an essential part of the job and fires don’t follow schedules. Working in the mobile phone industry definitely forces one to work mobile.
3. Only 10 or fewer vacation days a year. True again. I definitely took under 10 vacation days of leave last year. Of course, most of my staff did so too. So, I promise myself and my staff more vacation time. I just recently told them, “Vacations are good”.
4. Cancel vacation time regularly. Fortunately, this has not happened yet. However, there are a lot of times when it was cut short or interrupted a bit. Again, fires are not scheduled in advance too.
5. Gets an adrenaline rush while working. Yup. I like my work and like the nature of the work. I am definitely interested in what I am doing. Most of the work outside office hours is because of this level of interest.

So the final assessment is I am definitely working above the traditional 40-day work week. Although, my staff and I definitely need more vacation time. However, this does not quite equate to the extreme jobs described in the podcast yet. Again, work hours do no translate to efficacy. A person can work less hours and still be effective. It is a question of working smarter and doing more with less.

So, do you have an extreme job?

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Musings and Speculations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.